What am I doing?

So yesterday was a crazy weird busy good day. I drove in circles around the city atleast 3 times yesterday, which felt so bad. The seminary I goto received Hurricane relief food, and they distributed it out on thursday and had a bunch left over, and I was able to take a bunch of it. To deliver to my neighbors in the neighborhood. It was awesome. I got to catch up with people in the neighborhood that I haven’t conversed with in a long time. It was good to reconnect with some and find out that they still remembered the time when I boiled Crawfish in the neighborhood. Now I need to get back to working on my paper thats due on monday so peace out for now

Striking the cultural nerve!

“The challenge is to critique our culture with the Bible and not vice versa.”
Duvall and Hays _Grasping God’s Word.

        Today I have read about context, particularly about the context and baggage that we bring to things. Like how we often want to bring America to the Bible and not Bible to America. What I read today was a great expounding of thoughts I was already formulating but had no clue as to how to put it to words. They talked about stories like Jonah and the whale, and how we often think Jonah is inside some big belly cave. This is totally false though, well I believe it is though. I imagine the belly of a whale, to be mushy and abrasive and pretty confining and constricting. The authors of this book thinks the idea of Jonah in a big belly of a whale stems possibly from childhood memories of seeing Pinocchio sitting inside a whale.

        So I have been sorting through many ideals, and cultural norms of american life through my brain for the past couple of years. I have begun to critique a lot of our american standard thoughts and traditions and sifted them through a filter of the Bible. I feel like Irresistible Revolution has also played a role in this thought process, as Shane Claiborne challenged many many aspects of life in which we as americans feel content with. Many Christians are starting to question justification of war. If we are against abortion, can we be pro war in which many suffer and die.

Another is Romans 13. If we are to submit to our authorities, why are we so reluctant to pay, taxes, rent, bills, and or respect to those that we owe it.

        Duvall and Hays bring up the notion that people get pretty steamed up about challenges to their train of thought. In particular, they questioned whether the American Revolution is justified biblically because it was a blatant disrespect to authority. They hoped that there would be some inner emotional reaction within reading of a normal biblical text. They suggest that we should ask ourself “ Why did I react so strongly?”

        Duvall and Hays weren’t even trying to really challenge the thoughts of the American Revolution, but to help us be awakened to the many ideas that we accept as standard, in which they may not be biblically just. The response to being challenged over our traditional ideas is often to become defensive and get riled up instead of introspectively looking at Why something stirs us so deep, and questioning if our thought is biblically sound.

Our culture should never dictate the Word of God,

“We often become closed-minded to any understanding of the Bible that conflicts with the status quo of our culture.”

I often feel like a prick to always bring about hard questions, and judgments to the status quo of culture, but I feel it is a necessary trait that we need to start picking up. Many always talk about us buying into the lies of the world, however there are very few that try to figure out what lies they believe.

Back in NOLA - Gravity of Sorrows

So the past week has been tough. Evacuation, anxiety, confusion, close quarters. We are back! We arrived on Wednesday in the dark and cruised around the eerie dark streets. We rolled into the dark city to my truck, and found it unharmed and unmoved. I was relieved. We then came home and unpacked the car some and took off the panel that I blocked the door with. While settling back in with no electricity I realized that I had left a crucial box up at the farm house. The box contained all my school books.

        So we have been without power up until yesterday afternoon, friday afternoon. I have been unsuccessful at getting work done in the one school book that I have. The rest of my books will hopefully be arriving today with my other housemate. I feel the pressure of school, work, and bills getting to me. It’s getting a bit hard for me to manage my time. I am grateful for having good employers, and housemates. I have become very much of a hermit by nature, I like to spend time at home sitting in quiet and reflecting.
        
        I just watched the movie Transporter, not that great of a movie, and the main character doesn’t often say much and is yet still a very strong character. He enjoys quietness to think, and He silently knows a lot by instinct. We have a flaw though in transferring knowledge, I think that sometimes I think its too much trouble to get someone else to understand what is going on, and just give up and stay recluse. Inside I deeply want someone to take part in my life helping piece together the fragments of my mind and building “us” into being able to do more than 2 people.

        So in the above paragraph, at the end I was really thinking in terms of a significant other, and now I am thinking of people in general. I know that God has gifted us deeply and very differently, but I wonder if the depth at which we think is all apart of the mystery of it all. I hope it is, we often say the “older the wiser” and I partially wonder if thats true. I check out some of my friends brains, actions, trends and progressions, and sometimes am not too impressed. Yes this can just mean that I just have a very big head, and even if that is true I am ok with that, as long as I want to see others think better than I do. I feel like some people always wander around aimlessly wanting to become something, whether you give a weak, surface, ambiguous answer like, “I want to serve Christ,” or the american high school standard of “I want to make a lot of money!” I think there are people that are older that still respond with those same answers their whole life. To me that doesn’t show a lot of progression, and might just show that they aren’t that much wiser, because they haven’t come close to meeting their goal. God has given us very big, awesome, intricate brains to think very powerfully with, and the only kind of things we often think are ambiguous. I fall into this trap sometimes, and it just pushes me to think harder. The American life sells us so many ambiguous lies as to what success is often drowning out dreams and ambitions that make us feel worth something. These lies are often shown with some truth, but the truth on how to get there isn’t spoon fed to us like we think it is going to be. Dreams take work to get to, and often it takes work just to find out your dreams. Take joy in pain, hurt, and sorrow because Christ can use it all to redefine who you are in Him.

        Help empower others to do the things that you can, and learn how do to things from people that know more than you. Ladies, let your man learn how to cook, and be at least somewhat neat, clean, and tidy. And may the Lord help me with that as well!